Derailment: Sister lives with memory of tragic ride and loss of best friend Donna Smith

Wednesday

Dec 4, 2013 at 2:00 AMDec 4, 2013 at 11:12 PM

NEW WINDSOR – For Linda Smith, it all seems so surreal. The train wreck. The media swarms. The unfathomable loss.

James Nani

VIDEO: Watch the interview with Linda Smith, who describes the derailment and talks about her sister Donna Smith, who died in the tragedy.

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NEW WINDSOR – For Linda Smith, it all seems so surreal.

The train wreck.

The media swarms.

The unfathomable loss.

Sitting in the living room of her New Windsor home Tuesday evening, wearing her blue Renegades hoodie, she catches a glimpse of herself on the news being hauled away on a stretcher.

“That was freaky,” Smith says.

Even more surreal are the shots flashing on screen of her sister, Donna L. Smith, of Newburgh. All over her living room walls are photos of them together.

Then, a computer recreation of the wreck comes on the television, showing the train snaking past the Spuyten Duyvil curve and flying off the track from a bird's eye view.

The photos that surround her speak of an active life and tales of two sisters who also were best friends. On a cruise. After a karate class.

Finished cross stitch also hangs on the walls — they did that together, too.

Two days before, she and her sister were sitting next to each other in the first car of that train. "We always take the Metro-North. We always go to the Mets games. Always the train and always from Beacon and we never had a problem at all," Smith says. "We got on and everything was fine."

She says they dozed off almost immediately, but were aware of every stop. After Tarrytown, the express train keeps going until East 125th Street in Harlem and that's when Smith says she stopped paying attention.

Yet, when the train went barreling near the Spuyten Duyvil curve in the Bronx going 82 miles per hour in a 30 mph zone, that's when she noticed it.

"I don't know if I felt or heard first. It was just bizarre. It just felt wrong," Smith says. "It was bumpy and just seemed really at that point I was aware of going very fast."

It got bumpy.

Then everything tilted sideways.

Then the bumps turned to bounces.

Then the seat cushions flew into the air.

"It was like a movie going on around me," Smith remembers.

Then it stopped.

She was covered in seat cushions and, because of the angle, she says she couldn't move.

Smith stands up and grabs a newspaper. She points to a photo on the front page taken just after the wreck, with two people holding a white sheet in front of the first car, on the shores of the Spuyten Duyvil.

"That's my sister," she says.

She then moves her finger slightly up. "I was sitting in that window. I could look down and see her," Smith says.

Finally, a firefighter helped her out through the mountains of seat cushions in the car, but she wouldn't leave the area.

"I just kept saying 'I'm not leaving,'" Smith says.

Fast forward to Tuesday evening.

She says she needs to learn how to live normal again.

Move on.

What's important now, Smith says, is trying to remember Donna not as a victim of a crash but as the person she was.

They had planned to go see the Boston Pops at West Point this Sunday. They would have taken their yearly cruise next July. And every year, they went up to Lake George with friends.

"I just can't imagine living my life without her," Smith says.

jnani@th-record.com

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